Alden Bates' Weblog

I've mucked about with the template a bit to make it look more like the rest of my site. I started doing a complete template to make it look like my LiveJournal but then realised how long it would take. LiveJournal's method of creating journal styles, named S2, may be tricky to learn, but it's much easier to customise every page without duplicating a lot of effort.

I will have to fiddle with it a bit more to put in cool stuff like a blogroll and some links, and maybe install some plugins, but that should be fairly easy.

Back last year I posted about a possible way Movable Type could combat the spam problem thusly:

Even Movable Type has problems with spam, and they've been talking about ways to combat it.

Personally I'd have thought the easiest way would be to have a page which lists all the recently posted comments, in chronological order... that way the blog owner would be able to see comments made on months-old entries.

I see Movable Type 3 not only has such a page, but it does email notification like LiveJournal does. In fact, the back-end of MT 3.11 is pretty cool all told. :)

This is a new weblog. It's not intended to replace my old one, which is a LiveJournal, but to suppliment it. I'm still working out how I'll decide how to split the entries, and I may just end up using my LiveJournal for boring personal entries and this one for boring technical entries. You have been warned.

The main reason this is a Movable Type weblog and not another LiveJournal one, is because LiveJournal is missing a number of features which I don't expect will be implemented in the near future. Not limited to:

• Trackbacks
• Categories
• Decent commenting for people who don't have a LiveJournal themselves
• Etc

So this weblog here (I'm not too keen on the term 'blog' myself) now exists.